Category Archives: iPad Apps for The Little Ones

This week I was given a code for a new app in the Dr Seuss series for iOS, Dr. Seuss Band.

My daughter has The Cat in the Hat as her favourite film right now. She will watch it a couple of times in a row and laugh often. This means that when I get the opportunity to review the Dr Seuss apps these days I jump at it.

Most of them are book based apps which are ok but of limited interest to the little one. But this week I got a new type of app that is a musical app. It works a bit like Guitar Hero, where you press buttons in time to coloured bars moving down the screen.

Here are some of its notable features:

• 2 Ways to Play – Go for high scores in the Music Game or use Free Play to compose your own tunes. • 10 Original Songs – Play along with the soundtrack from The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss’s ABCs, Hop on Pop and more! • 5 Unique Horn Instruments – Play Seussian versions of the Trumpet, French Horn, Clarinet, Trombone and Flute. • 10 Crazy Horn Effects – Customize the sound of your horn by adding fun effects like a Fish Bowl, Train Whistle, Reverb and more!

I have been chatting to @punflaykids on Twitter for a while now. We often say good morning to each other (despite being in different parts of the world) and have a little chat.

Then one day I did a review for this site and updated my own list of recommended apps on my blog and Punflay tweeted me to say “Oh, you review iPad apps, do you fancy looking at some of ours”

“Sure” I answered and headed off to their website to check out what they had.

Wow. These guys really have a lot of very interesting looking apps. I immediately went back with a shopping list of apps for the little one and they sent me a few codes.

Let me just start by saying that these apps are brilliant. They are very close to Duck Duck Moose in being the best apps I have seen for my daughter. She has not stopped playing them since I downloaded them. The thing I love is that, as well as being fun, they are very educational, covering spelling, numbers, shapes, rhyming and spacial concepts like up and down. Within each app there are also different levels so the little one is able to do some fun games (spotting shapes, joining the dots by selecting the next number in sequence, up and down) but some will require her to be a little older (find the rhyming words).

My daughter was three a few weeks back and as a lovely gift, 965 Studios sent me a couple of codes for two of their Apps.

The Apps are Learn the Animals and Learn Fruit and Vegetables.

965 Studios is an American company and the codes came with an apology for the differences that I was likely to see/hear which is good because it at least forewarned me.

We Brits tend to be quite reserved when it comes to praise, so to hear a voice blasting out of the iPad saying “I’m so proud of you” is a little bit of a shock! However, the little one loves it and has now been known to wander up to me and say “I’m so proud of you mummy”

I love these apps. They are very simple, with a cartoon grid of pictures displayed first.

There is little my now-3-year-old daughter enjoys more than dressing her toys up and swapping all their clothes. She also enjoys making imaginary cups of tea (I am British remember) and food for us all.

My PlayHome is quite a simple little app. The people as you see them in the picture here are fixed in position like that (you can move them around obviously), but many of the objects that you see around them are interactive. There are 4 rooms: A bathroom, A kitchen, A bedroom and the Lounge/Living room.

Every room has specific objects you can interact with. In the bathroom you can put the people in the shower, and when they get wet you can use a towel to dry them off. There is very little animation involved. For example, you know they are wet because they drip, the towel doesn’t move but as you move it over a dripping character the drips disappear. Objects rotate to adapt to the surface you put them on so if you put a kid on a bed then they lie down. Sound accompanies each action.

At first, I wasn’t impressed. But the more you play with it, the more you start to appreciate the little things, like boiling the kettle, putting milk in the cup and then letting a character drink it. There is a CD player in the lounge with a collection of different CD’s that you can choose to play with different musical styles.

I eventually let the little one have a go too and after showing her the general principles for a few minutes I never got another look in. She quite happily plays with her house and family for ages, totally absorbed.

My criticism would be that there aren’t more things in each room to interact with and maybe you could actually dress and undress the characters (even if it wasn’t as far as letting them get naked!)

Overall though this app fools you into thinking there is not much to it with its simplicity but actually would definitely be a recommendation I would give to parents with kids of a similar age.

We’ve never tried the Dr. Seuss books before. In many ways it’s because Dr Seuss is an American product and living in the UK we find some of the language a little different and the accent can be a bit annoying (sorry!)

When your kid is very young and learning so much every day, you have to be careful that what they learn doesn’t confuse them. For example, we would say Zed not Zee for “Z”. What Americans call an Eggplant we call an Aubergine. In America a trunk on a car is what we call a boot in the UK. I could go on. But at the end of the day I tend to stay away from Americanised apps for my daughter.

When Oceanhouse Media contacted me about their latest Dr. Seuss book “Oh, the Thinks you can Think!” I figured I’d give it a try with the little one. She loves the books on the iPad. She loves books in whatever format to be honest!